Rebellious France must feel alone on the French political scene. After Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel on Saturday October 7, the party’s press release made its opponents, and some of its allies within the Nupes, jump. Here is an extract: “The armed offensive by Palestinian forces led by Hamas comes in a context of intensification of the Israeli occupation policy in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. We deplore the Israeli and Palestinian deaths.” And several rebellious deputies went even further, such as Louis Boyard who accused the French government of having turned a blind eye to “colonization and abuses in Palestine”.
From Bordeaux, where she attended the back-to-school campus of the presidential Renaissance party, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne hardly took any gloves to denounce the “revolting ambiguities” of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party. According to the head of government, the “anti-Zionism” of LFI is “also a way of masking anti-Semitism”.
His words enraged the rebellious leaders. They are “despicable”, replied the coordinator of LFI, Manuel Bompard. “I have expressed the constant position of our country since De Gaulle,” Jean-Luc Mélenchon was indignant. “The approval of the ongoing massacre dishonors Ms. Borne. France does not speak like that!”, he added in an apparent reference to Israeli reprisal operations, before accusing the Prime Minister of “rallying” to “an outsider’s point of view.”
“Totally shocking and inappropriate
This controversy over the Middle East also opens a new front in the endless crisis that the alliance of left parties, the New Popular Ecological and Social Union (Nupes), is going through. Divided for the Europeans in June 2024, it nevertheless aims to present a common candidate in the presidential election of 2027. Any position which, in the immediate future, does not condemn Palestinian Hamas “with clarity”, “disgusts me”, thus asserted the socialist deputy Jérôme Guedj. For him, the parallelism established by LFI between the Islamist movement and Israeli policy is not acceptable. So much so that for this fervent supporter of Nupes, “the question” of remaining in the alliance now “arises”.
The vocabulary used by LFI goes down poorly with its partners. “That some on the left talk about Hamas as ‘Palestinian armed forces’ disgusts me. Hamas is a terrorist organization,” socialist MP Valérie Rabault replied this Sunday. The violence of the words says a lot about the difficulty of the left to agree on one of the hottest issues in diplomacy, the reserved domain of the President of the Republic.
In this context, the position on Israel of the rebellious Somme MP François Ruffin did not go unnoticed: the one who is seen as a potential candidate in 2027 distinguished himself within his party by expressing his “total condemnation of the Hamas attack”, while worrying that the response lies “in the hands of the most brutal Israeli government in thirty years”. François Ruffin’s reaction was supported on the X platform by another LFI deputy, Alexis Corbière, who like him does not belong to Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s close circle. A position close to that of ecologists and communists: “The urgency is first of all to condemn the aggression, the terrorist act,” said Fabien Roussel, the national secretary of the PCF, on France 3.
On the left of LFI, another controversy broke out concerning the position of the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA). “We are all Palestinians”, proclaimed the party of Philippe Poutou and Olivier Besancenot, unambiguously affirming its support for the “Palestinian resistance”. The Union of Jewish Students of France (UEJF) announced its intention to file a complaint for advocating terrorism, worried about the impact of the NPA in French universities.